Heroku Operational Experience

Why running apps on Heroku is different

Heroku OpEx

Heroku’s operational experience lets you focus on what’s
most important - maintaining application health and providing
an optimal experience for your end users. Sit back and let
the platform monitor the key indicators of app health like
responsiveness and request failures, alert you proactively
so you can find (and fix) issues before your users do, and
effortlessly scale to meet increases in demand. We run one of the
world’s largest PaaS platforms hosting millions of apps,
so we understand the value of operations and know your time
is valuable. That’s why we provide integrated tools to
increase application visibility, diagnose issues, receive
proactive notifications and remediate issues to help developers
and operations staff maintain apps in a healthy state. The
platform
manages all downstack components freeing you to focus on
application operations, not infrastructure.

Application Metrics

Application metrics help you identify, investigate, and diagnose issues. Metrics provides key attributes of app health including response time, throughput, errors, dyno load, and memory, unified on a single time axis so you can see correlations. Accessible via the Heroku Dashboard, Application Metrics are available on all paid dynos.
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Threshold Alerting

Threshold Alerting lets you specify limits on web dyno 95th percentile response time and the percentage of failed requests, above which an alert will be triggered. Email, PagerDuty, and dashboard notifications are supported. Threshold Alerting is available to apps running on Professional or Private dynos.
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App webhooks

App webhooks allow you to subscribe to events and receive notifications when changes are made to your Heroku app. Webhooks make it easy to integrate changes like dyno formation changes or app releases into your operational workflow.
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Heroku Exec

Heroku Exec allows you to connect to a dyno at runtime via SSH to make debugging easier. With Exec you can copy files off of a dyno, attach a remote debugger via local port forwarding, and take advantage of common Java debugging tools.
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Discover Heroku OpEx

Visibility Into App Health

With up to 7-day metrics retention, Application Metrics helps you view trends and quickly identify anomalies in application health. Language Runtime Metrics and Exec provide further insights to help pinpoint the root cause of performance bottlenecks.

Proactive Notifications

We watch your app, so you don’t have to. Heroku sends notifications if the response time or error rate for your web dynos exceeds your criteria. Webhook notifications make it easy to integrate changes to your apps into a custom workflow.

Effortless Scaling

No need to keep an eye on your traffic spikes anymore, we automatically adjust the number of web dynos to meet your specified latency threshold.

Performance Tuning Guidance

With features like language-specific Application Guidance, we help you identify and correct application problems.

No Additional Cost

Metrics are available for Hobby dynos and above at no additional cost. Advanced features are unlocked as you move to higher level dynos.

Easy Debugging

With Language Runtime Metrics you can easily diagnose when your app is leaking memory. Then use Heroku Exec to find the root cause by connecting directly to a dyno at runtime.

Anything we can do on Heroku, we will do, because it simplifies operations so much.

The Heroku platform suits our remote team’s work style. Anyone on the team can easily manage or monitor our apps asynchronously, and automated features mean that nothing gets hung up while some team members are offline.

Documentation

Podcast

Listen to our podcast with Software Engineering Daily from February 28th, 2017.

In this podcast Andrew Gwozdziewycz, Heroku operational experience engineer, talks about the importance of application health, Heroku's metrics platform architecture and how it laid the foundation for autoscaling.